Not 100% American either, the Soviets have destroyed the Kwantung army in Manchuria.
So basically the Russians did most of the work in WW2, the Americans took most of the credit.

This is Lake Wobegon talking. You can't even comprehend written text correctly and you think yourself a mighty software developer? You are a monkey just like everyone else.

It is not about compiling. The errors that can be caught at compile time are almost always uninteresting typos. If you try to eliminate these, you just sacrifice the code readability because people will name their variables i and j instead of making them speak for themselves. But all kinds of shitty code will still compile just fine but fail in a billion of different ways in runtime.

It doesn't matter whether it is programming, flying an airplane or operating a nuclear power plant. Humans make errors. The less opportunities you give to a human to make errors, the better the results.

I wish C would do that. What happens in real life is that some miscalculated pointer just silently overwrites memory with random values causing irregular crashes that cease to happen when some printfs are added because the pointer suddenly overwrites memory elsewhere. Finding and squashing this kind of bugs in a huge project is a bitch. And all that because C programmers like to take shortcuts and otherwise cut corners because they think themselves real men. This is how it works, your description is more like wishful thinking. And this is also the reason for 90% of security holes out there. Macho programming languages are the wrong approach here, as are fully manual controls in a nuclear reactor or a modern airplane. The more monkey-proof, the better.

That is one possibility. The other is that it helps you to a shitload of bad habits which are then very difficult to get rid of while a proper language strictly enforces good practises.

Thus your example with the bootcamp is a wrong one. Learning C fist is like learning with the weekend militia wackos. You grab a gun and hope you won't shoot yourself in the foot. While higher level languages are more like a regular army. There are rules and rules and rules.

the son of perhaps the most powerful and well connected man on the earth

This is a quite biased look at history. 90 years ago USA wasn't nearly as important. It only changed after WW2 when it emerged as the only developed country with an intact infrastructure.

But it could be an even better example of what you were thinking about. Britain used to be a superpower. Nowadays not so much.

See it this way. Your parents have made a choice to give birth to you and raise you. The society has to live with the result of that choice. You really should consider yourself lucky the society accepts that sometimes people make stupid choices instead of preforming a post-natal abortion even if some think that you are a waste of oxygen.

Same goes for other kinds of choices.

I know enough East Germans. They are nice people and they can decide very well if they have to. Merkel is a product of Kohl's making and thus prefers to sit out everything.

What benefit? Russian gas was very reliable and inexpensive. Even during the height of the cold war the gas was supplied as promised. And now, thanks to the hubris of some stupid politicians we'll probably have to import the way too expensive LNG from USA. That will lead to a recession. In fact, thanks to the sanctions Germany has already only narrowly avoided it, but it still can happen next year. Trade is what keeps peace, but apparently, it is now too long ago since the last war, several EU chickenhawks are eager for a new one so they've started an economic war already.

Russia may need the income, but their debt is miniscule compared to every single first world country and their people are accustomed to bad times. After the hell of the 90ies nothing would scare Russians, they can wait it out for a while.

Except that Gazprom wasn't controlling the pipelines on their own, the distribution network was owned by the South Steam AG, which was a joint venture between Gazprom, Eni and EDF. EU tried to stall the project anyway - without real arguments, just for some political grandstanding - and this is the result.

It is much more embarrassing for the EU because Bulgaria won't see a cent of the carriage fees now. It is especially painful because Bulgaria is the poorest EU country and desperately needs money.

Wouldn't make much difference. Das Merkel doesn't say a lot and it doesn't do anything besides sitting there and texting.

That talking pantsuit could disappear and nobody would notice for weeks, if not months.

No she doesn't. SMS was a new and exciting technology for her during her first term (started late 2005). Internet is still new to her.

Well, ~70% of the average European price is a fraction, that is true. But not a small one. And justified due to generally lower gas prices on the global market.

In fact, it might even result in a net profit - leaving the notoriously not paying Ukraine out of the loop might be cheaper in long term.

There is a Marillion song just about this ;-)

Well, I gave up sugar and I gave up spice
I gave up everything that feels all right
'Cause I feel that these addictions
Are a chain you have to sever
I'm addicted to believing that I'm going to live forever

Here is another one:
An Ukrainian sees his neighbor felling trees on his property and asks puzzled:

- Why are you cutting down all these beautiful birches?
- I don't want the Russians to come and say: that landscape looks just like home

No worries, Supercop much better than that Rush Hour crap. Generally the late 80ies/early 90ies movies were the best, from the newer ones only "New Police Story" is really good, "Who am I" is somewhat entertaining, the rest is mostly a waste of time.